Suspended Animation
by thisisforyou
Summary: We were always an oddball family, the Watsons. There was a sense of suspended animation, of minding our own business while the world rushed past us. Well, that was then. T for drug use and other stuff.


We were always an oddball family, the Watsons. Strange and slightly dysfunctional and not at all the sort of relatives you mention at parties to make your social equals jealous.

Mum tried to be a singer and Dad tried to be an accountant and neither of them managed it particularly well. Mum was plain and ordinary to look at and every time she opened her mouth to sing all three of us kids would make violent noises of protest until she shut up. Dad looked like a rock star and was hopeless with numbers and sang us to sleep every night with his beautiful baritone. But they loved each other, always and forever, right up until the day the last of them was dead.

I was the youngest. I was Dad's favourite, though he told me that in confidence and made extra-sure to spoil the other two for the next week so they wouldn't find out. Mum was less tolerant; I always remember her being upset or frustrated as gig after late-night-pub gig fell through and wrinkle after wrinkle appeared on her face. She blamed us. "Look what you've done," she used to say, peering regretfully into the bathroom mirror as I struggled to dress by myself. "Look what you kids have done to me."

Harry – Harriett – was a tomboy from birth, apparently. I think Dad loved me so much because I was everything Harry wasn't, a little girl he could take tutu-shopping and show off to his workmates. She was twelve when I was born, and John was eight, and the feud between them that still exists today had begun already. Harry was always well-built and John took his time growing, so she used to hold him in a headlock in the playground and steal his crackling on Roast Pork Sundays.

John took on the role of my protector the moment I was born. I think it was mostly Harry he was trying to protect me from – which is probably why she never liked me – but the first time I was bullied in the school playground he came down from the college to send the bigger girls packing. He was my hero, the person I wrote all my stories about at primary school. I adored him. By the time I was thirteen all my friends wanted to hang out at my house after school in case they could catch a glimpse of him, and they never did because he was terrified of them, of their giggling and their mad crushes.

They were less keen on Harry, and not just because _I_ hated her; she and I were polar opposites. I took ballet lessons until I was eleven and she did kickboxing until she was nineteen. I was a straight-A student until I was fourteen and she was always more interested in smoking behind the janitor's shed and weekend piss-ups with her raucous friends. My parents adored me. She despised me.

I don't remember exactly when I stopped being Little Miss Perfect. I think it was a gradual thing and in my head it's connected with John going to medical school and spending less and less time at home. All I know for certain is that the year John actually moved out was the year I snorted coke for the first time. I was fifteen.

I didn't want John to know but I had to tell someone so I told Harry. She was already an alcoholic, twenty-seven and flatting as far away from Mum and Dad as she could afford. She didn't care about me, but she still 'owed me' for snitching on her seven years ago at some party or other so she rang Dad the moment I left her. He didn't tell Mum but John found out, and I could never stand the look on his face when someone brought it up.

I moved out when I was seventeen. I wanted to flat with John but he told me that he wouldn't live with a druggie, so I found somewhere else because that was the year one of my friends put a syringe in my hand and shooting cocaine became all-consuming.

Harry got engaged that year, too, even though none of us had even known she was seeing someone. I don't think any of us were surprised when we met her fiancée. Well, I was quite possibly high and mildly surprised that anyone, especially anyone as sweet and pretty as Clara, could want to marry my brutish sister, but Clara being female went entirely without comment. It just seemed right.

I tried to find some sort of career path, but got kicked out of every course I enrolled in because I turned up high or plummeting, either way completely out of my mind. I stopped talking to John, too, after the wedding that had started with our usual gentle, teasing relationship and ended in a blazing row over cocaine. It felt awful, but every time I shot I forgot about it in the rush of adrenaline.

I stopped when I was twenty. I had lunch with Harry – well, I say lunch, but it was 11.15 and neither of us ate much; I was broke and in withdrawal and she already drunk. I looked at my sister who'd always been so tough and she just looked broken, and if this was _alcohol_ I could imagine how _I_, on the brink of complete immersion in _cocaine_, must look. In a weird way I guess Harry made me stop. I stopped because I didn't want to be like her.

When I'd stopped vomiting and the craving had lessened a bit I decided I wanted to help other people. I pointed myself towards youth services and when I'd been clean for a month Dad lent me enough money to enrol in a course that could get me the right degree. He didn't tell Mum. To help me pay him right back I got a job at an insurance call centre.

Eighteen months after I started the course Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer and that coupled with all the claims of burned-down houses and dead relatives to force me into a clinical depression. I didn't have time to be depressed, and there was only one way I could think to get out of it. I hid it for a while because I was shooting only out of necessity, only when I had to, and I'd been clean for so long it was like starting over. But cocaine is a funny thing, and the addiction always wins in the end, and after a while I started to need more, and faster, until I could see the habit slipping into that wildly out-of-control place it was the first time.

I met an old friend at a club one night and it sounds selfish but I blame him; I was high and I recognised him because we used to shoot together years ago, and he asked me if I was still using so I said yes, because I was, and I think he must have been high too because he pressed a syringe on me, just _gave_ it to me, and even though it had about five times what I usually shot in it he told me to use it all in one go.

I found out later that it was called _speedballing_ and it was actually _meant_ to stop the heart for about ten seconds, but I didn't know that at the time. All I knew then was that the five seconds of high before I passed out was the best thing I'd ever experienced.

And that I would have died had not my delinquent high-school flatmate found me comatose on the floor with a needle in my arm and called an ambulance. And that Mum, Dad and especially John weren't happy. By that stage I couldn't have cared less what Mum thought and that sort of covered Dad as well, but neither of them were there when I woke up anyway and I don't think anyone even _told_ Harry until weeks later. There was only John.

Years later I asked him if he'd been angry when he heard. He told me he'd been angry on the bus to the hospital for about a minute, but mostly he'd just been scared. That he'd _wanted _to be angry, that he'd wanted me to _think_ he was angry, but he was just terrified I wouldn't make it and upset with himself for not being there. Then I felt guilty.

When I woke up he slapped me. I knew I deserved it but I cried anyway. And then he cried too, and he took me in his arms and held me and I loved him so much for being there. But I was resolutely shocked into silence by the fact that I'd made my heroic big brother cry.

I say I made an effort to change after that but I didn't really. Dad sent me to 'group therapy' sessions that were worse than all the failed Alcoholics Anonymous circles you see on crap television and I hated it. They say it helps to be around other people with the same problem, to know you're not alone. I hated those others because they reminded me how bad I looked. So I stopped the 'therapy' and told myself I'd come clean of my own accord. But of course I didn't.

Mum died three months after I got out of hospital. I blamed me. Harry blamed me. I knew Dad blamed me too but he didn't say anything. He just sort of retreated inside himself, a shell empty of every space that Mum used to fill inside him. I'd always wondered when I was little how they'd function without each other; together they worked like a well-oiled machine. Well, I knew then that they _couldn't _function without each other. And even though John and I and even Harry now and then came and stayed with him and tried to cheer him up he died a week after the first anniversary of her death. The doctor said he'd just lost the will to live. I think I knew how he felt.

I noticed in later years that it was never Harry that tried to keep in touch with John and I, it was always Clara. I didn't mind; I liked Clara a lot more than I liked Harry. I never speedballed again but the knowledge that it was there, that I knew it existed now and if I needed it I could do it properly this time, was cold comfort through Dad's funeral period. John joined the army that year and convinced me somehow that he'd be fine, that there was more money in it this way than trying to get into the overcrowded market for General Practitioners, and I believed him. I still trusted him implicitly.

But when he was sent off to Afghanistan I forgot all that. Harry did, too. Even she tried to talk him out of it. Clara said she should just leave it, that it was what John wanted. She was right, of course. One thing I remember about Clara is that she was always right. John loved action, loved being in the middle of things, and I suppose Afghanistan was as much in the action as one could ever get. But that was the move that finally made me give up drugs. What if John was shot and died in action while I was holed up in a flat somewhere shooting coke? What if _I_ died and he didn't find out until he got back? He was being so noble risking his life out there and I was a selfish unemployed layabout.

So not only did I stop but Clara used her connections to get me into Police College. I wrote to John to tell him and he wrote me a hugely enthusiastic letter back that told me he didn't believe me at all. Well, I remember thinking, I'd show him. I just hoped and prayed that I'd be _able_ to show him, that the war would be over and he'd come home. But I read the papers, and it didn't look like the war would ever end. He was there three years. By the time he came home I'd moved to Cornwall as a Police Detective with the MET.

The fight Clara and Harry had had over John joining the army turned out not to be their last or by far their worst. I still think they'd had worse than the one that eventually forced Harry out of the house they shared and put her name on a set of divorce papers. I think it made the two of us closer, really. She came to stay with me for a bit in my poky little Police-issue flat and we still argued, but it was softer, like we'd both finally grown out of it and realised our childish feud was so immature. It was only for three weeks, but I finally began to feel like I had a family again, that pack-bred feeling I'd had when we were children and hating Harry was something John and I did together that brought all of us closer as a family.

The army rang _me_ when John got shot. By rights they should have rung Harry because she was older, but the sergeant who called told me that John had said _Amy. Call Amy. _I broke down in tears so violent that I thought I'd die from not being able to breathe. The sergeant just said he'd been shot. They didn't say where until I was almost dead in the hallway. It was just a shoulder wound, he said eventually, but he was so mentally traumatised by what he had seen that day that he couldn't walk and the army would have to send him home.

I passed out with relief. My landlady heard the thud and came running, a nice lady who'd retired from the Service years ago, and when she saw the phone in my hand and the tears on my face she tucked me into bed and applied to my Inspector for bereavement leave. When I woke up I managed to explain to both of them what had happened, and the Inspector filed a transfer request for me. The army was going to put John up in London, they'd said. London could always use a cracking Detective Constable, he said – promoting me on the spot – and I'm sure your brother could use a little support.

I had a week in London before John arrived, and God it felt good to be back. Cornwall had been so quiet and I'd always known I was a city girl. London didn't just exist and survive, it lived and breathed and I lived and breathed with it. My unit got a case the day after I arrived. Two suicides, exactly the same. Detective Inspector Lestrade had grinned at me and said, _I hope you like puzzles_. I hated them, actually. Until then. That first week back in London was the first time I'd ever felt in the swim of things. As a child there had always been this sense of outsiderdom, like everyone else was moving along with the world and me and my family were floundering in suspended animation, frozen in our own private struggles. When John turned up on the heels of some psychopathic freak who called himself a consulting detective to the fourth suicide I was hardly surprised. In the thick, that's where John had always wanted to be. It didn't get thicker than this; the night we were reunited we ended up chasing a runaway cab over rooftops and through London backstreets and finally shooting some mad cabbie before he killed the consulting detective. I'd already found out that despite Sergeant Donovan's labels, Sherlock Holmes was neither psychopath nor freak. But that's another story.

Harry tried to keep in touch, but John shut her out. He moved into a cutesie little flat on Baker Street with Holmes. I was staying at the section house with the recruits, back at the place of my transformation, and I secretly wrote to Harry telling her what John was up to. I knew she'd do something stupid if I didn't. She wasn't a sensible drunk, and she was still drunk an awful lot. I didn't want her to change. So much had changed already that Harry was the only one of us I recognised. I may have nudged her back in Clara's direction, but if I did it was so subtle I'm sure she didn't notice. Nothing happened anyway, I'm told.

To Sherlock Holmes, for keeping John busy and in the middle of the action, I'll always be grateful. He is too, even though he grumbles so much. To John, you're still my hero, even though I bet you're going to edit half of the bits of this that put you in a good light when I send it to your laptop. Thanks for letting me vent on your blog. I'm too lazy to get my own. To DI Lestrade, for transferring me and letting me off so often so I can run around with my brother and his crazy flatmate, you probably don't want to know how often I could kiss you. To Harry… thanks. Just… thanks. To Mum and Dad, even though I know you can't hear, see or read this blogpost, I love you so much and I'm so sorry. For everything.

But things are going to be all right. They're already bloody brilliant.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: So turned out a lot weaker than I'd wanted. Isn't that always the case? It was just an experiment anyway, I don't usually write in this style. I was going to do this from Harry's point of view, but an OC was just so much easier. Oh, and in case you can't tell, though it's probably glaringly obvious, I've never shot cocaine in my life. I've never even snorted more than enough to give me a vaguely pleasant buzzing sensation, and I probably never will.**

**Pfft. I'll probably take this down after a week or so. I just wanted a little bit of feedback. So please review, won't you? Makes me happy.**


End file.
